Abram teaches us that altars are places where we give to God and God gives to us, and this is reiterated over and over again in scripture. Altars come in all shapes and sizes. They are tables like any other, but what we do there sets them apart. During the early days of the pandemic, when we couldn’t worship all together, many of you made altars in your homes. Some of you lit candles there or kept your rosary on it. Some of you set up altars near your televisions or screens so that you could watch virtual services and participate from your own space.
Read MoreThe gift of diversity that was revealed at Babel was not taken away at the first Pentecost. The people did not begin speaking the same language, they began to understand one another’s languages. They were able to connect with their neighbors in a deeply spiritual way in the midst of diversity, not in spite of it.
Read MoreTo have life without end, for Jesus, is not something we can achieve by possessing the right set of facts, even the right set of beliefs, like some final exam of life. Instead, Jesus is inviting us into the knowledge that is a participation in God’s own self—the relationship of the Father and the Son and the Spirit in which we can become members in a life of love that been in existence from before time. To enter this knowledge, we are called to be students of Jesus, disciples who learn to enter his way of being.
Read MoreI’ve seen on social media that several Episcopal churches are celebrating the feast of the Ascension by flying kites. Clearly I’m not alone in finding a beautiful symmetry between this feast day and the story of Mary Poppins. They are both stories for all ages and all spiritual journeys. They remind us of our need to step out of our comfort zone as people of faith, and they remind us of our need to sink back into that comfort and joy when our work is done.
Read MoreThe messages of Jesus and Paul start to merge. Paul tells us that God is as close to us as the lives we lead. We live and move in God, he says. Don’t look for exterior objects to give us meaning. Moth and rust consume. And to boil down what Jesus tells us, it is in effect that when we love, we see God. God is not found in human constructs, as in which political party we support or our desire for personal ease or advancement at the expense of others. Our chosen messiahs will disappoint.
Read MoreSo on this coronation weekend, filled with all the splendor one could hope for, may we also find ourselves renewed by the Christian message. May we be reminded about community and humble service and the true King of kings.
Read MoreThe Good Shepherd discourse is divided into three sections, and we rotate through them on our three-year lectionary cycle. In this year’s section of the story, we don’t get to the part where Jesus says, “I am the Good Shepherd.” As you may have noticed, we only got as far as Jesus saying, “I am the gate for the sheep.” Of course, “Gate Sunday” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, and I don’t think a gate would be as cute stuck on a onesie, so I can understand why we stick to the Good Shepherd theme.
Read MoreEaster is God’s sermon that nothing can separate us from God, not any of our sins and not even death. The empty tomb on Easter morning is a sign of a cosmic, universe-altering event. But God’s spiritual food has also been placed where we can reach it. Easter is personal to each of us, a joyful promise that we are forever beloved by a God who refuses to let anything separate us ever again.
Read MoreOur dear friend Ragan once described the older liturgies in our tradition as coming from the attic of our faith. I love this image. I think about it every year at the Vigil. It’s as if once a year, we climb up to the attic, dust off the cobwebs, and bring down the box of our oldest and most cherished memories of the faith and sift through them together.
Read MoreIt was on this night, in a celebration of Passover, that having loved his own Jesus loved them to the end. He showed this love by breaking bread and pouring wine, signs of the death that would be his ultimate offering. It was on this night that Jesus humbled himself and washed the feet of his disciples, even the feet of his betrayer. This humble washing was a living parable, an example of the love that was to mark out his disciples in the world.
Read MoreFrom his reading of the ancient texts, he could not determine whether Zechariah’s king coming into Jerusalem was riding a donkey or its offspring. Matthew so wanted to get it right, but he could not find an easy answer. Sound familiar in our own lives? So, Matthew did something, probably not unlike what most of us would do: He put Jesus on both a donkey and its offspring. Not a very pretty solution. Go back and read the lesson carefully and compare it with the other gospellers’ accounts. Yes, according to Matthew, Jesus sat on the back of two animals as he entered Jerusalem. No absolutes, no black or white.
Read MoreI don’t know of anyone who has been resurrected , and excepting the final resurrection at the culmination of history, I assume that none of us plan to be. And yet, Lazarus is somewhat of an exemplar for us. The reality of our Christian hope is that we receive the grace of resurrection all the time. We get to start over every single day on the path towards righteousness.
Read MoreWhat if there was a way that our vision could be trained for more than what meets the normal human eye? That’s a possibility our scriptures introduce to us this morning. From Samuel learning to see as God sees to Jesus showing his disciples that there is more to the world than the systems of sin and shame, we learn that God’s vision of the world contains colors that are invisible to normal sight and yet can be seen by the light of God’s grace.
Read MoreThe people had lost faith that God was present with them in the arid, empty desert. But that same arid emptiness was all God needed to bring forth life. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating, a basic fact about our God is that where we see only death, God always offers life. There are times in our lives when this is easier to trust than others. It is good and holy when our faith does not waver. But Meribah and Massah teach us that it is also good and holy when our faith is born out of struggle and doubt.
Read MoreJohn’s gospel has layers upon layers of meaning. Human truths and divine ones merge into a universe of meaning far greater than anything we or Nicodemus ever imagined.
Read MoreShame and guilt are ideas that usually go hand in hand with penitence in the season of Lent. But Brené Brown suggests that we might need to look at repentance in a different way, and she’s not alone. Each year on Ash Wednesday we are greeted by the insuppressible faith and determination of the prophet Joel, who, as it turns out, has been speaking Brown's language all along.
Read MoreSometimes, when I think about Moses offering the Israelites life or death, blessings or curses, I imagine him in a black tie and apron with a pen and pad waiting to take my order at a fancy restaurant. “Our specials this evening are life in which you’ll have length of days so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, Isaac, and to Jacob; or death, in which you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. What can I get you? Life? Great. We’ll have that right out for you!”
Read MoreJesus is asking us to look outside ourselves and consider the high stakes of following Christ in our world. Jesus may be saying something more, something about the kingdom of God in the midst of the kingdoms of this world. So we might understand Jesus to be saying: Salt is either salty or it is not salt at all. A lamp gives light to the house or it is no lamp at all. If there is a hill and you can see no city upon it, then there is no city. The gospel that we or any of us proclaim is either the gospel of Jesus Christ or it is no gospel at all.
Read MoreLike many of us, I’ve always thought of the Beatitudes as comforting, maybe even a little sweet. But we can start to see that they are more like a roadmap for a much more demanding way to live - with radical compassion for everyone, with a holy grief that the world is not as it should be, and with a mandate to take up only our God-given space while keeping our egos in check.
Read MoreThe author of Matthew’s Gospel understood this connection the people had with the land and he used it to make a brilliant theological point. He wanted his readers to understand that Jesus was one of them, that they had the same people and were from the same place. He wanted them to see themselves in the narrative, to know that the story of Jesus was also a story about them. As Southerners, we are particularly gifted at placing ourselves in the geography of a narrative, so I think that we are poised to receive this message from the Gospel of Matthew: that the story of Jesus is also a story about us.
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